Chicago Times.
"The most interesting portion of Captain Glazier's 'Down the Great River' is the beginning, where the author gives the details of an expedition made in 1881 by himself with five companions, when he claims, with good grounds, to have fixed the actual, true source of the Great River. His attention was called in 1876 to the fact that, though everybody knows the mouth of the stream, there was then much uncertainty about the source. In 1881 he found time to organize the expedition named, and crossing the country to Itasca, embarked and pushed through that lake up a stream flowing into it, and came upon another considerable body of water fed by three streams originating in springs at the foot of a curved range of hills some miles further on. This lake he fixed upon as the true source, and since his published accounts many geographers and map-workers have modified their works according to his discoveries. He does not claim to be the actual discoverer of the lake, as such, but only to have been the first to discover and establish the fact that it is the highest link in a chain in which Itasca is another; or, in other words, the true source of the river. The Indian name of the lake is Pokegama, and this, the author says, he would have retained, but was overruled by the other five, who insisted on calling it Lake Glazier. For the particulars of the interesting story the reader must be referred to the volume itself. Captain Glazier is an old traveler and a practised writer. The manner of his journey down the Mississippi enabled him to see well all there was to see, and he enables his readers to see also."
Chicago Inter-Ocean.
"Readers of 'Soldiers of the Saddle,' 'Capture, Prison-Pen and Escape,' and other writings of Captain Glazier will require no urging to read the entertaining volume 'Down the Great River.' It is an account of the discovery of the true source of the Mississippi River, with pictorial and descriptive views of cities, towns and scenery gathered from a canoe voyage from its head waters to the Gulf. For fifty years American youth have been taught that 'the Mississippi rises in Lake Itasca,' until Captain Glazier, in this memorable journey of one hundred and seventeen days in his canoe, demonstrated the error and mapped the facts so accurately as to settle the question for all time. Leading geographers and educational publishers have already made changes in their maps and given due credit to Captain Glazier and his new lake. To say the Mississippi rises in Lake Glazier is only doing simple justice to the intrepid explorer and hero of many battles. The book is charmingly written, mainly in the form of a diary, and contains facts of great value, so interwoven with incidents and fine descriptions and novel adventures as to be as interesting as the best romance. One could scarcely find better history or finer descriptions or be more fully impressed with the breadth and length and grandeur of American possessions than by journeying with Captain Glazier in his canoe down the grand river of the continent. The volume is handsomely printed and bound and well illustrated."
Chicago Evening Journal.
"However the knowledge may affect the world at large that the source of the mighty Mississippi is other than generations of geography students have been taught that it was, there is little doubt left in the reader's mind, after perusing Captain Willard Glazier's 'Down the Great River,' that we have all been in the wrong about it, and that this most peerless river was born, not in Itasca's sparkling springs, but in another wider and deeper lake that lies still further south and bears the name of its discoverer, the author of this interesting volume of exploration and adventure. There is something charming in the simple thought of an expedition such as the one undertaken by Captain Glazier. Imagine long, silent days of absolutely unbroken communion with Nature! Slipping along in a frail canoe, without the sound of an uncongenial human speech, of clanging bells or grating wheels, through circling hours of unbroken calm, with only the swish of bending reeds and lapping waters to break the hush and remind one of a sentient world. Perhaps the author and his Indian guides occasionally exchanged a word, or the two white companions and himself indulged in a laugh that started the rattling echoes of the hills, but there was no chatter, no twaddle, no dissensions. The narrative reads like a story. Reading it, one longs to start for Lake Glazier to-morrow, and thence descending, halt not in his long course until his faithful canoe slips out into the waters of the Southern Gulf, three thousand miles away. A man with a soul in him would rather take such a trip with all its hardships and its perils than go on a hundred cut-and-dried trips to Europe. The book is handsomely bound and well illustrated."